Minimizing GUI event traces

Lazaro Clapp, Osbert Bastani, Saswat Anand, Alex Aiken
2016 Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering - FSE 2016  
GUI input generation tools for Android apps, such as Android's Monkey [13] , are useful for automatically producing test inputs, but these tests are generally orders of magnitude larger than necessary, making them difficult for humans to understand. We present a technique for minimizing the output of such tools. Our technique accounts for the nondeterministic behavior of mobile apps, producing small event traces that reach a desired activity with high probability. We propose a variant of delta
more » ... ebugging [36, 38] , augmented to handle non-determinism, to solve the problem of trace minimization. We evaluate our algorithm on two sets of commercial and open-source Android applications, showing that we can minimize large event traces reaching a particular application activity, producing traces that are, on average, less than 2% the size of the original traces.
doi:10.1145/2950290.2950342 dblp:conf/sigsoft/ClappBAA16 fatcat:2dhn7zrpandfnkwxnmlyud2tye